I’d like to once again note that Trump is held to *lower* standards than every other user on Twitter and Facebook. When he tweets something that goes against their rules, the most they’ll typically do is to put a note saying “yes, it violated the rules, but we’re leaving it.” https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1321070309827616769

This was the subject of my most recent article https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/no-its-not-proof-bias-social-media-companies-enforce-their-rules

Facebook and Twitter didn’t know what to do about a situation where *the president* was someone regularly breaching the terms of service, so they can to carve out special rules for him.

Conservatives love to do this thing where they break the terms of service on platforms like FB, Twitter, or YouTube, and then when the rules get enforced they go “Bias! Bias! I am being silenced for my political beliefs!”

It’s what NY Post is doing now with its Twitter.

Twitter realized that its policy on hacks didn’t carve out necessary exemptions for the press, so it reversed course pretty fast in response to backlash. Cool. That’s not why the Post’s account is frozen, though.

The Post tweeted a screenshot from their article containing a visible email address. Literally, all they would have had to do was to redact the address in the photo, and Twitter would have been fine with it. It’s an old rule that is consistently applied.

This is that policy. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-information

And this is what Twitter says happens when you violate that policy.

Right now the NY Post is claiming martyrdom because they’re being told they need to follow the same rules as everyone else.

“Funny how these things always happen to only the right!”

Not true. Here’s one prominent example of it happening to the left. And this was an even more extreme enforcement, which was based on a phone number in the article, not image https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/splinter-news-doxed-stephen-miller-and-twitter-had-no-choice-but-to-stop-it.html

It has nothing to do with the content of their story. It doesn’t even matter that it’s from a story at all. It is really just because they included what was a private email address for someone who clearly didn’t give permission to share it.

Whenever a large account does something like that, Twitter tends to notice.

One thing conservative groups had a habit of doing on Twitter was placing ads that very clearly didn’t meet the company’s ad standards (which are different from general content standards), wait for them to be pulled down, and then get free media coverage. https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/twitter-ceo-jack-dorseys-decision-ban-political-ads-puts-one-bad-faith-move-out-bounds

It’s the same thing groups like PETA do with Super Bowl ads.

1. Submit ad that will almost certainly get rejected.
2. Turn “our ad got rejected!” into a story.
3. Wait for outlets to cover it, driving traffic to the ad elsewhere.